Amelia Atwater-Rhodes - Token of Darkness

“Not really,” Brent said. “Most ghosts tend to be location-specific. They’re rarely seen. Even ghosts who haunt people tend not to be very communicative outside of a séance or something. You’re sure your character hasn’t desecrated any graves lately? Maybe an Indian burial ground or an ancient pagan temple?”

“Pretty sure,” Cooper answered, smiling despite himself. It was the longest conversation he had had with anyone but Samantha since the accident, and even if it wasn’t remotely helpful, it felt good to joke around with another living human being.

Brent regarded the guy next to him in a vaguely clinical fashion. He had recognized Cooper Blake pretty quickly as one of the receivers from the public high’s football team. They had actually met once, at a New Year’s Eve party last winter, but Brent wasn’t surprised that Cooper didn’t remember. He had been introduced to Cooper, but they hadn’t talked long.

He had been surprised to be invited to the party in the first place; he and Delilah had been involved since that September, but she had shown absolutely no interest in including him in the rest of her social life before then. He hadn’t been thrilled by the event, and she hadn’t invited him to any more.

He would have been happy to see Delilah’s school friends in small groups; he just didn’t deal well with crowds, which pulsed with the scurry of other people’s thoughts, most of them unfocused and indistinct like a constant background whine that only Brent could hear. There had also been a synergy of thought among the team that was deeply unsettling for an outsider, and left him feeling distinctly outside no matter how welcoming the group tried to be.

Cooper, on the other hand, was hard to peg. The thoughts Brent could make out were almost hyper-focused, with a kind of white noise behind them. It wasn’t something Brent had heard the likes of before, which was why he had gladly engaged in the conversation about ghosts. He was curious, and the noise made by Cooper’s brain wasn’t offensive. Even the zinging background thoughts that shot past Cooper’s more conscious ones were so quickly suppressed that they sounded like the rustling of wind chimes.

One thing Brent knew for sure was that Cooper was seeing this ghost he described. Whether that meant he was psychic or hallucinating, Brent didn’t know. When Brent had volunteered at the local hospital for a couple weeks over the summer, he had briefly been in a room with a hallucinating schizophrenic, and it had been spine-crawlingly horrible. The things that poor man saw, the voices he heard, were so angry. They befouled his mind and the space around him, so much so that Brent had left the room gagging, his head pounding.

That was when Brent decided to finish his mandatory for-graduation community service at the library instead. It was quiet here, especially in the summertime. People were so trained to keep their voices down in the presence of the towering stacks of books that they even instinctively kept their thoughts small, so they were like little fluttering moths in the night.

“You okay?”

It took Brent a moment to realize that Cooper had said something.

“Oh yeah, sorry, man,” Brent replied. “Um … oh. You haven’t said when this guy started seeing his ghost.”

“Does it matter?” Cooper asked.

To Brent, the static at the back of Cooper’s mind seemed to get louder, as did all those rapid background thoughts.

“Sure it matters,” Brent said, drawing back a little from his examination of Cooper’s thoughts and trying to pay attention to the words he was saying, too. It was difficult, because thoughts weren’t really comprised of any one sense, which influenced the way Brent experienced them; he tended to use words like hear, but he could just as well say he saw thoughts, or felt them—or maybe it was a combination. “If he hasn’t messed up a grave or something else to get a particular ghost attached to him, then he’s either seen ghosts all his life, or something triggered it.”

Cooper shook his head. “It’s a recent thing.”

“How recent?”

“Couple months.”

More static.

“When, specifically, did it start? I mean, what precipitated it?”

Even louder. Brent started wondering if he should back down, but he wanted to know, and that meant pushing a little harder and dealing with the headache he would have later.

“He saw her for the first time after a nightmare,” Cooper answered hesitantly.

“About what?”

The static rose to a roar and those gentle wind chimes became a screeching, slamming cacophony of noise, flashing lights, and panic emanating from inside Cooper’s suddenly tensed body. Overwhelmed by the impact, Brent bit his lip so hard he tasted blood as he tried to tune it out.

He reached to put a hand on Cooper’s shoulder, trying to calm him. “I’m sorry, man,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—”

Wham.

Brent couldn’t begin to describe what happened next. He had just touched Cooper’s arm, when Cooper looked up, his hazel eyes suddenly an eerie silver color. Without moving, without doing a damn thing, it felt as if Cooper shoved him backward, so hard he was flying through the air.

Brent tried to curl, to brace himself for the fall, for the crash of his body impacting the shelves behind him, but it didn’t come.

Instead, he found himself sitting exactly where he had been, only coughing so hard he felt like his lungs had forgotten how to inhale. His whole body was shaking as if he was coming out of deep hypothermia, and Cooper was drawing back, looking horrified, his face gray-pale with sweat beading on his brow.

“I’m sorry,” Cooper whispered. Brent could still hear those jangling noises and lights in Cooper’s brain, but was too shaken to try to tune them out or to focus on them.

They were no longer alone. A girl knelt beside Brent in scene-style clothing—mismatched and torn, but artfully so. Even if she had come to complain about the commotion they were making, he was grateful for her presence. She looked quizzically at Cooper, who just shook his head, still backing away as the girl knelt and tilted her head as she examined Brent.

Around them, the shadows seemed to pulse. Cooper’s gaze shot from one dark blur to the next, and the girl shuddered when they drew near enough to touch her. They growled and snapped at Brent.

“I’m sorry,” Cooper said again. “Samantha, we should go.”

“Cooper!” the girl shouted, sounding cross and frightened. Brent was still too dazed from whatever had happened to pick up any thoughts from her.

“Wait!” Brent choked out, but Cooper just turned and dashed the other way, his limp almost hidden in his haste as he shouldered through the double doors to the staircase.

There was no use going after him, even if Brent could have moved at that moment. Cooper didn’t want to be stopped. That was okay; Brent didn’t think he was ready to deal with the ex-football star again yet. He couldn’t even stand.

He drew in deep, gasping breaths. He had no idea what had just happened, or if it had been Cooper’s fault or his own. He was a telepath, but unlike many of the people he had spent the last year studying with, he wasn’t good at recognizing or controlling other kinds of power. He had no idea what those shadow-things had been, except that they clearly weren’t good.

“Can you help me up?” he asked the girl.

She jumped, and then tentatively offered her hand, with an expression of pure shock. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he answered, “I think so.”

He reached up, only to have her whole form dissolve when he tried to grasp her hand. Cooper’s ghost? But did that mean Brent had really seen her, or had she just been a lingering image from Cooper’s mind? At least, once she was gone, the shadows started to sink back into the floor and walls around him.